The fourth campaign covered the years 1898-1900, and was under the direct control of the University of Pennsylvania. Excavations were commenced at the extreme south-eastern end of the west ridge. Spring and summer were spent by Haynes in a 'nervous search' for tablets, although a strictly scientific examination of Nippur had been asked for. Late tablets and coffins resulted from this search; finds of old Babylonian character were meagre. The director did not see eye to eye with his architects, and one of them, Mr Fisher, resigned, returning, however, in the autumn of 1899. The Committee in America requested Haynes to confine his efforts to the exploration of the eastern half of the temple court, and to this task he addressed himself with zeal if only with partial success. Tablets, according to the director, sufficient to institute "a distinct library by itself," continued to pour out of 'Tablet Hill.' But technical and expert advice was lacking. The architects desired to remove a Parthian round tower, Haynes reluctantly consented, and upon its removal the gate of an ancient temple was unearthed. Hilprecht Returns Professor Hilprecht now reappeared, and his coming put a new complexion on affairs. A trained and efficient archæologist, he saw at once that 'Tablet Hill' represented the site of the temple library, so resolved to leave its excavation to a later expedition, and meantime to settle "the more essential topographical questions." He saw that these once answered, "it would be a comparatively easy task for the Committee to have the single mounds excavated one after another by somebody else, if necessity arose, who was less familiar with the ruins and the history of their exploration. Every trench cut henceforth--and there were a great many--was cut for the sole purpose of excavating structures systematically and of gathering necessary data for the history and topography of ancient Nippur. If these trenches yielded tangible museum results at the same time, so much the better; if they did not," he says, "I was not troubled by their absence." However, "antiquities were found so abundantly in the pursuit of the plan described, that the principle was established anew that a strictly scientific method of excavating is at the same time the most profitable."